“As for my vague
anxiety about my future I think I analyzed it all in A Fool’s Life (1927), except for a social factor, namely the
shadow of feudalism cast over my life. This I omitted purposely, not at all certain
that I could really clarify the social context in which I lived.” -Akutagawa (1927, in his suicide note)
In 1915 the prolific Japanese writer Akutagawa Rynosuke penned
the novella Rashomon which - combined
with another of his stories titled In A
Grove - became the basis for Kurosawa Akira’s cinematic “shot heard round
the world,” as well as an American adaptation called The Outrage (1964) by Martin Ritt, starring Paul Newman. Like Kurosawa after him, Akutagawa reinterpreted
Japanese folkloric traditions and mined the caverns of his own dismal history
in a quest for linguistic mastery, unflinchingly cinematic in his clarity
despite his choice of medium. Akutagawa’s
two main phases of literary output could be generalized in the former by
folkloric/historical extracts, and in the latter by autobiographical extracts. All throughout, one constant exists; the
dissolution of “truth” or “fact” through the blending of reality and fantasy.
Akutagawa’s later autobiographical works, such as A Fool’s Life and Cogwheels were dedicated to a character (himself) ill-at-ease in the
purposeless patterns of daily life, whose obsessive dejection is the playground
for revelation, no matter how pained. The
diary chronicle Cogwheels charts
Akutagawa’s rise to a hallucinatory tipping point, steeped in the anxieties of
one afeared of losing their mind. A Fool’s Life is a poetic volume of
epigrams (numbered 1-51) that express “moral and philosophical reflections,
parables and metaphors” as Akutagawa collides pure fiction, autobiography, and
sheer musing seamlessly. It is this particular
focus that inducts Akutagawa into the Occupy
Nowhere conversation. The character
of his self undergoes existential upheaval while exiled-in-plain-sight by the
tides of expectation and the mundane. 
To celebrate Akutagawa’s consequential contribution to
cinema, and the undeniable cinema of his language, I have included several excerpts
from A Fool’s Life. Consider how
each, in their brevity, resonates with Occupy
Nowhere’s emotional core, and how Akutagawa interprets so many shades of escape
or disenfranchisement – physical, emotional, psychological - which are dismaying
but ultimately revealing. He observes
that which can only be expressed by one inhabiting that disenfranchisement, and
also that which escapes them – as reflected in the opening quote above. That sentiment of not knowing how to clarify
his own social context is reminiscent of the same incapacity held by the first
Occupy Wallstreet protestors.
This first selection entitled Self, is altogether a swan song for Occupy Nowhere, wholly about formative escape. The exact volume that contains the stories
referenced here can be found inexpensively on amazon and even at Brick Bat Books in South Philadelphia.
5. SELF
With a
graduate, sitting at a café table, puffing at one cigarette after another. He hardly opened his mouth. But listened intently to the graduate’s
words.
“Today I
spent half a day riding in a car.”
“On
business, I suppose?”
His senior,
cheek reclining on palm, replied extremely casually.
“Huh? –
Just felt like it.”
The words
opened up for him an unknown realm - close to the gods, a realm of Self.
It was painful. And ecstatic .
The café
was cramped. Under a painting of the god
Pan, in a red pot, a gum tree. Its fleshly
leaves. Limp
3. HOME
In the
outskirts in a room on the second floor he slept and woke. Maybe the foundation was shaky, the second
floor somehow seemed to tilt.
On this
second floor he and his aunt constantly quarreled. Nor was there a time when his foster parents
had not had to intervene. And yet, above
all others, it was his aunt he loved. All
her life alone, when he was in his twenties she was almost sixty.
In the
outskirts in this room on the second floor, that those who loved each other
caused each other misery troubled him. Feeling
sick at the rooms tilting.
7. PAINTING
All at once
he was struck. Standing in front of a
bookshop looking at a collection of paintings by Van Gogh, it hit him. This was painting. Of course, these Van Gogh’s were merely photo
reproductions. But even so, he could
feel in them a self rising intensely to the surface.
The passion
of these paintings renewed his vision. He
saw now the undulations of a tree’s branching, the curve of a woman’s cheek.
One
overcast autumn dusk outside the city he had walked through an underpass. There
at the far side of the embankment stood a cart. As he walked by he had the feeling that
somebody had passed this way before him. Who? – There was for him no longer need to
question. In his twenty-three year old
mind, an ear lopped off, a Dutchman, in his mouth a long-stemmed pipe, on the
sullen landscape set piercing eyes.
30. RAIN
On a big
bed with her, talking of this and that. Outside
the bedroom window rain was falling. The
blossoms of crinum must be rotting away. Her face still seemed to linger in moonlight. But talking with her was no longer not
tiresome. Lying on his stomach, quietly
lighting a cigarette he realized the days he spent with her had already
amounted to seven years.
“Am I in
love with this woman?”
He
wondered. Even to his self-scrutinizing self the answer came as a surprise.
“I still am.”
51. DEFEAT
The hand taking up the pen had
started to tremble. He drooled. His head, only after a 0.8 dose of Veronal,
did it have any clarity. But only then
for half an hour or an hour. In this
semi-darkness day to day he lived. The
blade nicked, a slim sword for a stick.
**Look forward to a post about the film Portrait of Hell (1969), adapted from Akutagawa’s Hell Screen.**
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